1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of automation technology and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for controlling a distributed automation system.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the rapid development of the production and manufacturing sectors in the global market economy, there is an increasingly important need to improve the efficiency and adaptability of production and manufacturing systems. Along with this need, production and manufacturing systems need to have the capability to deal with the positional disturbances generated by changes in product needs, control systems and commercial processing.
Recently, automation technology has gradually developed towards distributed control, and distributed control is now capable of making operations and cooperation between various machines and pieces of equipment more optimized through standardized interfaces, thus reducing establishment and operational costs.
FIG. 1 is a system diagram for distributed automation control. As shown in FIG. 1, the system has a plurality of function blocks (FB) with standard interfaces, i.e., a transporting device block 102, a processing block 103, a scanning block 104 and a packaging block 105, cooperation between these function blocks being controlled by a cooperation control block 101, and the data necessary in the control process being able to be input by peripheral equipment, such as a human-machine interface 100. However, in the prior art, due to the cooperation control logics used by the cooperation control block 101, which implement the cooperative relationships between the function blocks, in a hard-coded manner, the cooperation unit control block 101 can only deal with predictable disturbances. If unpredictable disturbances occur, system operation must stop to allow new codes to be manually written. Therefore, the existing distributed automation control solutions waste not only time but also manpower, and there are also certain limitations in the efficiency and adaptability of the distributed automation system.